The Grassy Knoll : "III"

(Antilles, 1998)

The Grassy Knoll aren't playing what fusion jazz sounded like in the early '70s but what it should sound like now: bristling with broken hip-hop breaks, Money Mark- like Hammond B-3 fills, dark ambient, post-rock (particularly Cul du Sac), heavy noise, and lo-fi distortion crackles. It's all there, along with some singing trumpet lines, bass clarinet, sinister electric violin, sludgy deep basslines, and some jagged electric guitar.
"A Beaten Dog Beneath the Hail" opens with Bonzo big beats. Buzzing guitars snake about the regimented rhythm, and several Miles- ish trumpet lines skim the surfaces like a waterbug. Ellery Eskelin's admirable tenor sax work comes to the fore in "Down in the Happy Zone," set before an alternating fusillade of distorted noise, and surreally screaming strings (violin and cello). Think Wayne Shorter soloing over a Carbon record cut with shards of Henryk Gorecki. "Every Third Thought" stays with the strings and softens the blow of the album's first two tracks. "Blue Wires" has an asskicking blaxploitation sound: swinging muted trumpet over superfunky wah- wah guitar. And all this in the first sixteen minutes.
The album seems to paradoxically turn a new corner with every track, but somehow never loses its overall continuity. It's as if the melee of one track somehow unearths the seeds of the next and plants them in a different sound far away. The final track, "Thunder Ain't Rain," lays a squirmy repetitive crawl under the deepest bass this side of a Praxis record, and dices the whole affair up with acid- fried electric violin that makes Jean-Luc Ponty sound like the stuff of Bar Mitzvah bands.
This is fusion, children. Not the smooth supermarket sounds of delicate electric guitar and unobtrusive sax. This is the dangerous fusion, an exercise in the grotesque: sonic miscegenation and unchecked generation of forms. It's almost occult in execution. Ouroboros baby: the snake that devours its own tail forever.

Brent S. Sirota

Cover painting : Mark Rothko

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